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Pihole+unbound DNS on my daily driver feasibility? (alien.top)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

6 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Hey everyone, glad to be posting here for the first time.
I just got into tech and I'm absolutely loving it!

I'm sorry if my post is a bit rambling, I don't have many friends who are into linux and I am learning by myself so I don't really know how to ask for help?

I've been using chatGPT to do some home linux projects, so far I've made a nextcloud server on my 'server computer'. It has a pfsense firewall and you can only access it with a VPN connection. I've been looking for more stuff to do and I found pihole and unbound DNS as a potential project.

I have been trying to set up a pihole+unbound DNS server on my daily computer as below

pihole 53:53 tcp/udp 80:80 tcp / dns =127.0.0.1 1.1.1.1 -- made in a docker container

unbound dns is installed from package manager

But the thing is, there is this program called dnsmasq which is used by qemu/kvm, docker, and lxd/lxc which occupies port 53 so even though pihole is supposed to restart automatically, when I reboot the pihole container will be stopped. THen I have to kill dnsmasq process and start pihole container.

Also, if I go to starbucks and I want to use the wifi, I will need to log into it from the captive wifi portal. Will the pihole+unbound be able to use this? I am guessing that starbucks wifi will hand out the DNS server from the DHCP, and the DNS server will hand out the private IP to the captive wifi portal.

I am also having problems with pihole refusing connections or timing out, but I can get to that later.

I'm wondering whether instead of placing the pihole+unbound on my server, can I put it on my daily laptop?

The idea is that I want to be able to get a little bit more privacy by using unbound DNS for my daily, but if I am going to do that I might as well enhance it with pihole and block some of those malware/phishing sites.

But if this is going to cause problems, I dont think it is worth it for my daily. Maybe it will be better if I just make it as a server in a virtual network in my daily driver as a DNS server that serves the virtual machines only?

Can I have your opinions on this?

I use Arch btw... :)

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

disable dnsmasq?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

I tried but it just keeps popping up whenever I reboot, and it binds to port 53 so the pihole container doesnt start because it causes an error.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Just disable dnsmasq or configure it to run on a different port.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/dnsmasq

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Thanks, I will try this.

But what do you think about using pihole+unbound DNS on a daily laptop? Or should I keep it to the home server?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Only issue with that is up time. Laptops have a tendency to go into sleep mode so if it does you lose DNS. Just gotta make sure it doesn't do that. I know some are incredibly annoying with power settings and you can't get rid of that behavior (Lenovo...).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

I think that because the pihole+unbound is only going to be used by my laptop, I just need the DNS to be up when my laptop is actively being used.

But switching between DNSmasq and pihole+unbound sounds like a real bother to me. I think I will just set up pihole+unbound as a container on my home server computer and use whatever DNS is given to me by their respective router when I am out and about.

Thanks for getting back to me :)

but